commentaries on Plato a term designating the works in the tradition of commentary (hypomnema) on Plato that may go back to the Old Academy (Crantor is attested by Proclus to have been the first to have ‘commented’ on the Timaeus). More probably, the tradition arises in the first century B.C. in Alexandria, where we find Eudorus commenting, again, on the Timaeus, but possibly also (if the scholars who attribute to him the Anonymous Theaetetus Commentary are correct) on the Theaetetus. It seems also as if the Stoic Posidonius composed a commentary of some sort on the Timaeus. The commentary form (such as we can observe in the biblical commentaries of Philo of Alexandria) owes much to the Stoic tradition of commentary on Homer, as practiced by the second-century B.C. School of Pergamum. It was normal to select (usually consecutive) portions of text (lemmata) for general, and then detailed, comment, raising and answering ‘problems’ (aporiai), refuting one’s predecessors, and dealing with points of both doctrine and philology. By the second century A.D. the tradition of Platonic commentary was firmly established. We have evidence of commentaries by the Middle Platonists Gaius, Albinus, Atticus, Numenius, and Cronius, mainly on the Timaeus, but also on at least parts of the Republic, as well as a work by Atticus’s pupil Herpocration of Argos, in twentyfour books, on Plato’s work as a whole. These works are all lost, but in the surviving works of Plutarch we find exegesis of parts of Plato’s works, such as the creation of the soul in the Timaeus (35a–36d). The Latin commentary of Calcidius (fourth century A.D.) is also basically Middle Platonic. In the Neoplatonic period (after Plotinus, who did not indulge in formal commentary, though many of his essays are in fact informal commentaries), we have evidence of much more comprehensive exegetic activity. Porphyry initiated the tradition with commentaries on the Phaedo, Cratylus, Sophist, Philebus, Parmenides (of which the surviving anonymous fragment of commentary is probably a part), and the Timaeus. He also commented on the myth of Er in the Republic. It seems to have been Porphyry who is responsible for introducing the allegorical interpretation of the introductory portions of the dialogues, though it was only his follower Iamblichus (who also commented on all the above dialogues, as well as the Alcibiades and the Phaedrus) who introduced the principle that each dialogue should have only one central theme, or skopos. The tradition was carried on in the Athenian School by Syrianus and his pupils Hermeias (on the Phaedrus – surviving) and Proclus (Alcibiades, Cratylus, Timaeus, Parmenides – all surviving, at least in part), and continued in later times by Damascius (Phaedo, Philebus, Parmenides) and Olympiodorus (Alcibiades, Phaedo, Gorgias – also surviving, though sometimes only in the form of pupils’ notes).
These commentaries are not now to be valued primarily as expositions of Plato’s thought (though they do contain useful insights, and much valuable information); they are best regarded as original philosophical treatises presented in the mode of commentary, as is so much of later Greek philosophy, where it is not originality but rather faithfulness to an inspired master and a great tradition that is being striven for.
See also MIDDLE PLATONISM, NEOPLATON- ISM , PLAT. J.M.D.